For a long time now, Dialogue has subdivided the prose in each issue into  Articles and Essays, Personal Voices,  and Fiction.  These divisions are  strained by current submissions.

The division between Articles and Essays always seemed pretty nebulous to me–”Articles” is, I think, meant to signify academicishness, while “Essays” are, presumably, thinky but not necessarily heavily footnoted.  But since most academics younger than 40 (50?) don’t feel the need to scrupulously avoid the first person or affect the semblance of “objectivity” that once characterized scholarly writing, and since  postmodern theoretical frameworks in many disciplines actually encourage the self-conscious articulation of one’s subject position, a good deal of academic writing seems less formal and more “Essay”istic than in decades past.  Still, since these two categories have been lumped together for a long time, it’s easy to just leave them that way, without too much fretting about what’s an article and what’s an essay.

The distinctions between “Personal Voices” and “Fiction” are blurred by the newish category (is it a genre yet, or still?) of “creative nonfiction.”  There is, of course, a whole (sub)genre of writing devoted to the exploration of what creative nonfiction is, but this is the sort of thing that even someone who managed to tolerate an entire graduate seminar on the definition of postmodernism (and its discontents), can hardly wade through for more than a few dozen pages without starting to mutter things like “ivory tower”, “navel gazing”, “job security for English majors”  under her breath.  If pressed for a shorthand definition, I would say that “creative nonfiction” organizes itself around a narrative sequence, where a personal essay grows out of the exploration of an idea or a theme.  [I know that's not a terribly satisfying definition, and I hope it will lead to plenty of  interesting quibbling in the comments].

So far, I’ve lumped one creative non-fiction piece in with the fiction, and put one into Personal Voices, which used to mean “Personal Essays.”   But the Table of Contents is not really the problem, of course–such practical issues of categorization are easily managed.  What troubles me is that I think Creative Nonfiction may eventually edge out Personal Essays altogether, and Mormons will join the rest of the world in creating slightly detached, ironic memoirs, heartbreaking works of staggering genius, and non-fiction that is so “creative” as to create epic scandals on Oprah.

This, it seems to me, would be a terrible loss.  My sentiment may be merely the midlife nostalgia of  someone whose early intellectual life was nurtured by Eugene England, Laurel Ulrich, Marden Clark, Louise Plummer, Elouise Bell and other mid-20th-century Mormons who found the personal essay form apt for the function of exploring the tangled intersections of their own thoughts with Mormon theology and culture, and, in essaying those heights and depths, laid down a thin golden thread for me to follow home after venturing into my own wildernesses.  Certainly Mormon artists and thinkers have used other genres to accomplish some of the same work–there were the novelists of the 1940s, historians and biographers whose narratives of the Mormon past took on the contours of a founding epic (or myth, if the word can be tolerated), poets and hymnodists who made both art and theology, folklorists and storytellers, and always autobiographers and journal-keepers.  One could argue, in fact, that the sine qua non of modern Mormonism, Joseph Smith’s account of the First Vision, was itself a work of creative non-fiction, and that the proliferation of that genre is thus wholly appropriate and ought to be welcomed as quintessentially Mormon.

And still, I want to argue that we need the Mormon personal essay, for another couple of decades, at least.  It is an important mode of resistance against the tropes of post-post-modernism:  irony,  satire, parody,  snark.  We like our memoirs biting–David Sedaris vivisecting his family for our amusement, Augusten Burroughs mining addiction and ruin for dark comedy, Elizabeth Wurtzel and Marya Hornbacher making depression and eating disorders into lurid spectacle.  Always, the narrative “I” is disconnected–the story is always in the past tense.  Wherever these authors were then, they are not now–now they are on book tours (which will later be cynically described and illustrated with sketches of amusingly pathetic audience members), allowing readers a faux-intimacy with a literary version of their past selves.  Sincerity has somehow come to be seen as antithetical to the “authenticity”  of such rehearsals.  And Mormonism could lend itself perfectly to the wry, sardonic-but-affectionate tone of the memoir/sketch/vaguely parodic short story.  What could be better, funnier, more authentic then poking a little fun at your own religious convictions and practice?  How better to show that Mormons are not weird, that we are good Americans, that we get the jokes in Big Love, too, and ought to be allowed to hang out with the cool kids now?  Maybe we could even get Ira Glass to do one story where the Mormon character is not a bigot or a rube!

But we are weird.  We believe (or wish we could) in angels, gold plates, prophets in bad suits and conservative ties, sending our children to faraway places to do that most unhip thing of all–proselyting!  We spend three hours (!) every week talking didactically [I would say sermonizing, except that "sermon" implies a liveliness and polish we eschew in favor of unskilled sincerity] about our doctrine, debating the significance of grammatical errors in holy writ, exhorting each other to repentance, enduring “special musical numbers”  [seriously, how could you possibly parody something that unironically calls itself "special"?], organizing do-good-y projects of all sorts, testifying in tearful, clumsy words and acts of pure grace.  We are earnest.

And so is the personal essay–it’s not properly “authentic”, because the author deigns to invite the reader into the creative thicket with her.  The invitation only works when it is sincere, when the author cares about the reader, recognizes that author-ity is always a gift, whether by the laying on of hands or of eyes and reading glasses.  Creative nonfiction can be “truth…independent in that sphere where [the author] has placed it.”  If a memoir falls in the forest, it makes a noise whether or not anyone hears it–its narrative is still “true.”  Not so the essay–it is meaningful only in community, where two or three (well, at least two–a writer and a reader) are gathered.   It is tentative, pensive, incomplete, partial; it believes in and relies on that which is yet to be revealed. [Like blog posts by certain writers, it may overuse the em-dash, the semi-colon, and the parenthetical aside].  It works only when it is earnest, unabashed, when the writer is willing not only to confess her indiscretions, but to abandon discretion and announce her convictions as well as questioning them.  Belief and hope are terribly out of fashion just now, and look to be so for a few years yet, and that is why Mormon literature needs a literary form that allows us to “believe all things, …hope all things,”  to “seek after” things that are true and lovely, not from the artist’s garret or the therapist’s couch or the book tour lectern, not in the safety of the ironic past tense, but in the earnest, present willingness to subjugate narrative authority for the sake of communal pursuit of ideas.

3 boxes Dialogue

1 box JMH, BYU Studies

1 box Mormon women’s history

What about you?  What’s on your shelves?  Do the relative proportions of things reflect your personality and interests?  I find, for instance, that grad school themes are drastically overrepresented compared to what I really do all day.  On the other hand, there are also not-so-subtle hints about what it is I should be doing all day in the boxes of music.  What have you discovered packing up your library (or unpacking it, like Walter Benjamin)?

I had occasion recently to attend a very, very, very high church Anglican service.  I’m a smells and bells gal–love a good mass or Evensong service–but even for me, the aesthetic of this liturgical event was seriously over-the-top.  It occurred to me as I thought about the dozens–maybe even hundreds–of hours that must have gone into rehearsals for this service that it would be very different to be an artist in a church culture that regards the pursuit of beauty as holy, and the sharing of that beauty as an important communal act, than it is to be a Mormon artist.

Usually the only art in a Mormon service is music, and its inclusion has always been somewhat anxiety-provoking.  Long before Dallin H. Oaks articulated the “principle of non-distraction,” the Church Handbook of Instructions allowed music with careful constraints, rather than positively advocating an aesthetic of worship.  In reading the Church Handbook  guidelines, it’s impossible not to conclude that “worship” is some nebulous good thing, constantly imperiled by the potential encroachment of music that is “designed to draw attention to the performance”  (rather, than, I suppose, providing sonic cover for the exodus of a third part of the host of heaven third of the congregation to go out to the water fountain or the restroom) or performed on an instrument with a “prominent or less worshipful sound,” like, say, the trumpets and timbrels mentioned in the psalms.  Visual art would seem to be similarly dangerous–the Spirit of the Lord can, apparently, be frightened away by the sight of a piece of art that is not in the catalog of approved works by inspired Seventh-Day Adventists.

I can’t think of much great music or art that is motivated primarily by a desire NOT to distract or offend.  Of course there’s art that is so experimental or so heretical or frankly obscene that its presence would be incompatible with worship.  I’m afraid, though, that in our concern to avoid such things, we’ve made everything that is not mediocre taboo.  We certainly don’t affirm the potential holiness of beauty and excellence.  Theologically, we have much more warrant for such affirmation than many Christians who believe in human beings’ essentially corrupt nature and emphasize the yawning gulf between humanity and deity.  We believe that our creative capacities are potentially not just mirrors of divine power, but actually the embryonic beginnings of human capacity for divinity.

So what the #$#!! are we doing with best-selling books designed to let the ward choir get up to torture the congregation after only 10 minutes of rehearsal??

Occasionally, I hate writing one because I’m not sure I’ve made the right decision and I’m afraid I’ll want the paper/essay/poem back in a few days.  But mostly I hate them because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.  I also don’t want to be falsely kind about a bit of writing that is really bad.  I do, honestly, find something to like about almost every submission I read.  It feels like a sacred trust when people have plumbed their souls to make an offering, and I want to find and acknowledge the gifts in each poem or essay or story.  Still, sometimes something goes awry, and the beautiful thing that was in an author’s soul comes out in an ungrammatical or unoriginal or uninteresting or simply unlovely way and it’s my job to say so.

So, what’s the right way to say it?  Do you want a form letter so that it’s not a personal rejection?  Do you want specific criticism? Do you want to know exactly how bad it is and why, or is it enough to know that “it doesn’t fit our needs at this time”?

Being a FSL-LM who is also an effete snob in an “open and affirming” Congregational worship service!

Usually, my preference for inclusive language is overridden by my even stronger aesthetic preferences when I’m confronted with hymns that have been denuded of gendered God-language in favor of clunky repetitions and jarringly unmetrical, if ever so politically inoffensive, formulations like  “What God’s almighty power hath made, God’s gracious mercy keepeth;/By morning glow or evening shade God’s watchful eye ne’er sleepeth”  or “How firm a foundation, ye Saints of the Lord, is laid for your faith in God’s excellent word! What more can be said than to you God has said…”

Ugh.

So I was working myself into a nice little holier-than-thou-and-with-better-taste-and-more-refined-appreciation-for-vestigial-Germanic-verb-endings snit, when I was stopped by the last line of the Doxology.  The traditional text is “Praise God, from whom all blessings flow/Praise Him, all creatures here below/Praise Him above, ye heav’nly host/Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.”   In the Congregational version, presumably to avoid the heavily gendered Trinity, the last line was rendered “Creator, Christ, and Comforter.”

Leaving aside the tiny little theological squabbles we might have with God the Father as ‘Creator,’ I really liked this formulation. It’s still clunky, and “Comforter” comes out with the wrong word stress in the melody, but it’s not absolutely awful, and I do think it yields a richer picture of the God we are praising, if only (or mostly) by jolting us out of the utterly familiar phrase we’re used to.

So, what that made me think about was the interrelation between revelation and creative work. Do artists/poets/novelists/composers improve their access to revelation by doing such work? How does this sort of revelation differ from the kind one gets during prayer or meditation or in yoga class or while chasing toddlers?  And, more broadly, do artistic reworkings of theological ideas end up actually changing theology?

I would be inclined to think that claiming influence on a church’s theology would be a grandiose posture for an artist, except that I once spent a long time examining Primary songbooks for an article in Dialogue (which you can read, if you’re exceptionally patient, here).  In a church like ours where, particularly since the ascendance of Correlation at mid-century, theology tends to be promulgated from the top down, you’d expect such officially-sanctioned compositions to merely reflect the teachings by authority figures.  In fact, though, to take the most dramatic example, the increased emphasis on Christ and the neo-orthodox Christology which became widespread in the church after President Benson’s 1987 talk, “Come Unto Christ,” is actually prefigured by Primary songs composed as much as 20 years before that talk.

Our church is probably a special case, since we have relatively little official theology and also tend to borrow art and music from other traditions, but that shouldn’t stop us from wildly speculative musings about the interrelationship of art and doctrinal teaching–so have at it!

One problem I’m running across often is the failure to find some midpoint between narration and preaching, between anecdote and position paper.  Lots of times people submit as “essays” pieces that are simply short stories that happen to be true.  I like reading them, occasionally I’d consider publishing a particularly well-written one, but usually I want more. I want the anecdote to do some work, to help make sense of some problem that transcends a particular episode in the author’s life.

The opposite problem, of course, is just as bad–abstractions wrenched from their context in a particular life end up sounding preachy or just plain boring.

I think I do a decent job of recognizing when someone has gotten it “just right,” but I’m often unsure of how to advise someone to revise to get from sermon or anecdote to essay.  Do you all have practical advice?  Or a really good theory of the essay that makes it all clear?

We have a collection of books that only come out in December, and I love many of them–some just because my kids love them, some because they evoke memories of my childhood (there’s a ghastly scratch-and-sniff book called The Sweet Smell of Christmas that is an all-time favorite because it’s one the kids’ father had as a child), and a few because they are beautiful.

Christmas Day in the Morning, though, seems not just beautiful, but very nearly perfect to me.  The prose is spare, but rich enough, full of deep feeling without ever lapsing into sentimentality.  I almost never make it through without tears, but I’m not resentful, as I am with, say, The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey, where the intent to draw those tears is so blamed obvious (and so !#$@#! successful.  Every. Time. Grrrrrrr.).  I imagine that if I had grown up on a farm, it might seem a little romanticized to me, but I suffer from the faux-nostalgia for a simple farming life that afflicts most North American non-farmers, so it works for me.  And I like Buehner’s illustrations very much; they seem, like the prose, not over-sweet or precious.

So, I have some questions:  what do you read to your children at Christmastime?  What do you think makes a good Christmas book?  And have you found grown-up Advent reading that is satisfying?  I’ve tried a few collections and a couple of novels (whose very names I have sworn will never cross my lips), but I haven’t found quite the right thing.  The Story of the Other Wise Man, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, The Gift of the Magi, and a few others inevitably get read at least once a year, but I don’t think I have found the perfect Christmas book yet.  Maybe one of you is writing it?

A few days ago, we had a very interesting discussion based on a personal essay about one couple’s experience of loss in fertility treatment. We touched on some of the theological issues surrounding ensoulment, the politics of declaring when life begins, and some of the sociological difficulties around discussions of this topic. All in about a couple thousand words. There’s nothing wrong with that. The discussion was mostly intelligent and constructive, there were useful insights shared. Life is short, we want to communicate efficiently–for many purposes, the executive summary will suffice.

But not for one purpose, which may be the most important one. God commands us to love with all our minds, as well as our hearts. All our minds. To me, that sounds like work. A lot of work, in fact, the kind of work that generates long, footnoted, carefully edited papers like this one. It’s true that we live in an age of multi-tasking, bullet-point lists, attention-grabbing graphics–we are all, whether we want to be or not, masters of the quick, the shallow, the superficial. But our God is not a soundbite God, and he wants our entire, sustained attention. Dead trees, footnotes, and the Chicago Manual of Style are good for learning to slow down and pay attention.

As to the ‘Eroica,’ I had meant to tell you how I felt about it, but it opens the flood-gates, and I can’t. The wail of grief, and then the sympathy which should comfort the sufferer. The wonderful funeral dirge, so solemn, so full, so deep, so splendid, and always with courage and comfort. The delightful march home from the grave in the scherzo, the wild Hungarian, almost gypsy in tone,and then the climax of the melody, where the gates of Heaven open, and we see the angels singing and reaching their hands to us with perfect welcome. No words are of any avail, and never does that passage of entire relief and joy come to me without tears. I wait for it through life, and hear it, and wonder.
–Henry Lee Higginson, from a letter to a friend

Henry Lee Higginson is one of my great heroes. He is most remembered for his founding of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, but he contributed a great many other things to the civic life of Boston, including a large playing field (Soldier’s Field, for all you HBS grads) and a community center (Harvard Union) for college students, and several Civil War memorials.

Early in his life, he would have seemed an unlikely philanthropist–he broke rather severely with his high-society Boston lineage, and went to Europe to study music. The depth of his lifelong feeling for music is evident in the passage above about Beethoven’s Third Symphony. When he decided to pursue music as a course of study, he wrote, in a letter to his parents:

I know not how one finds that he has a talent for any one thing without trying: but everyone has a particular faculty for something, everyone has a decided turn and talent for a particular branch, and it is his duty to try to find this out, and to turn to it. If one may trust what he hears within himself, in his own heart, and be sure that it is right, I should say that my talent was for music, and that, if I studied it properly and persevered, I could bring out something worth having, worthy of a life thus spent, worthy of a man, worthy of my mother and of you….

His study of music, though, was cut short by neuralgia in his arm, and by the treatment for it, which consisted chiefly of bloodletting. He returned to Boston in 1860, and his attempts at finding a job were interrupted by the outbreak of the Civil War. He had a successful career as an officer, but was wounded and felt very deeply the loss of many friends. After the war, he failed at several business ventures before finally resigning himself to joining his father’s company and discovering, somewhat to his horror, that he was very, very good at making money.

In describing the path his love for music had taken, he wrote (late in life):

Sixty years ago I wished to be a musician, and therefore went to Vienna, where I studied two years and a half diligently, learned of music, something about musicians, and one other thing–that I had no talent for music. I heard there and in other European cities the best orchestras, and much wished that our own country should have such fine orchestras.

For many years I had hard work to earn my living and support my wife…. All these years I watched the musical conditions in Boston, hoping to make them better. I believed that an orchestra of excellent musicians under one head and devoted to a single purpose could produce fine results, and wished for the ability to support such an undertaking; for I saw that it was impossible to give music at fair prices and make the Orchestra pay expenses.

He therefore founded the orchestra himself, giving an enormous sum of money himself, and committing to supporting the orchestra on an ongoing basis until it could be established as a cultural institution that commanded support from other benefactors. It is no exaggeration to say that the BSO (and all the other symphony orchestras that followed in the US) exist because of his contribution. His determination to recreate the great orchestral music of Europe in an American setting has blessed the lives of generations of musicians and listeners, and the model for private patronage that he established has allowed American cultural institutions to thrive despite the lack of government patronage on the scale that European institutions enjoy.

At the end of the BSO’s first (wildly successful) season, Higginson was invited to the podium. He said that the concerts had been “a great joy, not only because of the music, but chiefly because of the refreshment and enjoyment of the multitude of people unknown to me, who, leading gray lives, have needed this sunshine.”

(You can read a pretty good brief biography of Higginson here, and I would highly recommend it–he is eloquent on many subjects).

For me, there are a couple of important lessons for would-be artists or lovers of art in Higginson’s story. First, that it’s important to be honest about where one’s talents lie. I feel particularly drawn to Higginson because, like him, I have a great love, but relatively little talent, for music. There’s a strong egalitarian strain in American culture that tries to tell all kids that they can be anything they want to be. The truth is, of course, that we come with varied gifts, and sometimes our desires and our abilities will be mismatched–this is one of the great pains of mortality, but like many of those pains, it is potentially redemptive. It seems to me that Higginson’s honesty about his musical talent and his determination to continue enjoying music are a wonderful counterexample to the image of Salieri from _Amadeus_, the frustrated artist consumed by bitterness at his inadequacy. Higginson shows us a better way.

It seems to me that Higginson’s life also teaches us the power of the amateur, the lover, of the arts. We live in an era when the practice of the humanities tends towards specialization and professionalization–one needs an MFA or a Ph.D. in violin performance, or a post-graduate certificate in sculpture to feel that she is entitled to make art. The long tradition of amateur cultural production in the church–dramas, oratorical contests, dance festivals–has almost completely disappeared. We should not, however, lose sight of the theological imperative (and I really mean that!) to be engaged in whatever creative pursuits we are able to be, at whatever level we can. If our potential is truly as limitless as our doctrine teaches us it is, then we have no time to be discouraged by the imperfection of our mortal abilities–we must get on with the eternal project of creation.

Finally, I love Higginson’s devotion to “the multitude of people unknown to [him],” and his determination to bring sunshine into gray lives. It’s a generous, altruistic motive for making art that we should be careful to keep in mind and heart as we work.

1)  I am not very nice when I’m feeling defensive.  (Sorry, Kathy)

2) The problem of branding in Mormon publications is a very strange beast.

Let’s take Segullah and Exponent II as examples.  I still haven’t seen anything in Segullah that the editors of Exponent wouldn’t have been delighted to have had as a submission.  I have seen enough sass and gentle irreverence in Segullah’s writers to think they would be people I’d like to see at an Exponent retreat, and that they might even have a good time.  It still pains me that they felt excluded/put off/offended/unwelcome/unreached/??? by Exponent II and didn’t join the party.  It hurts me, too, that women I know to be faithful, participating, thoughtful, and committed Latter-day Saints are regarded as unacceptably divergent from some ill-defined “mainstream”–so much so that some of their sisters are unwilling to consider their words or appear in the same pages with them.

There are similar issues in practically every genre of Mo publishing–lots of folks won’t even consider reading Dialogue, but are perfectly happy with JMH (even though JMH prints its fair share of things that ought to be controversial).  People publish things in Irreantum that I think are too dark or difficult for Dialogue, but Irreantum never comes up in anyone’s list of “alternate voices.”  BYU professors can publish things in Element that would never pass orthodoxy muster for BYU Studies, but they feel their status may be jeopardized by publishing them in Dialogue.  And poor Sunstone gets the rap for everything, even though (for instance) Dialogue published most of the articles that got the September Six in trouble.  When I asked on the AML list what makes an Irreantum story different from a Sunstone story different from a Dialogue story, the only answers were about people’s comfort with the relative orthodoxy of the other things that were published in a particular outlet.  That’s understandable, but it says disturbing things about the development of a robust aesthetic sense within Mormon culture.  If we only define “good art” as not containing whatever it is we regard as “bad”, whether that is profanity or sex or heresies that diverge from our own pet heterodoxies, the pursuit of excellence may be subsumed by the pursuit of the unobjectionable.  I can’t think of anything less authentically Mormon than such timidity.

I guess what I’m wondering is whether, now that the late 80s/early 90s are well behind us, we can come up with some more vivid and interesting way to define our publications’ niches besides on some spectrum of orthodoxy that really doesn’t describe much of anything useful anymore (if it ever did).